An application for chats from UAE held responsible for espionage: ToTok has already been eliminated from the official stores of Google and Apple.

Don’t make the mistake of reading TikTok for inference. The article does not talk about social media that is becoming more popular among the younger ones, but about an application with a similar name ToTok, dedicated to chats and according to reports capable of gaining a good following globally in the last period. Over the weekend it was banned from Google Play and the App Store.

Spying via chat: the ToTok case

The reason? According to the US authorities, it is a tool for espionage prepared by the United Arab Emirates, capable of intercepting users’ conversations, tracing their location, stealing information about connections on social platforms and peek through the media content within the devices. In short, a huge violation of privacy.

Officially the developer is Breej Holding, but concrete evidence would have emerged that behind the project is DarkMatter, a company funded by the Arab nation that among its ranks counts former representatives of the NSA and Israeli military intelligence.

Links with Pax AI, another company already held responsible for data collection operations through practices that are not properly legitimate, have also been revealed. Still, the app would be a modified clone of another software by the same nature but intended for China, called YeeCall.

The largest number of downloads for ToTok has been recorded in Arab countries, but recently interest in the app has grown internationally, particularly in the United States. In case it has been downloaded and installed inside your smartphone, the advice is, of course, to remove it as soon as possible.